I believe the act of seeing profoundly affects the way we behave and the way the world is.
The tools and the materials we use to make art alter and shape that vision. My work grows out of this exchange, exploring how the act of making art mirrors the journey of the maker and generates meaning . With a background in photography and painting I am attempting to lay bare the hidden structures behind the digital and the analogue and to interrogate the consequences for our art and for ourselves.
The painter constructs and the photographer discloses.
The intention is to reinvest digital photography with a sense of the tactile. The qualities of traditional analogue photography ,of transparency, the negative and “the trace” are also explored in other mediums.
I work with wood, glass, mirror and silkscreen: materials that carry their own history.The wood is reclaimed oak, taken from the floorboards of my house that literally support our life, glass holds an image but lets us see through and past it, mirror returns our image implicating us in the work, silkscreen is the residue of a mechanical eye. Working between them lets me hold presence and absence in the supports built from what was once solid beneath our feet but is now surfaced. The work does not seek to resolve those spaces but to hold them and their shadows next to each other and let those haunted spaces speak.
We reach for the stars knowing there is no promise of paradise and are haunted by that. It is that reaching echoed in the natural world whose rhythms overflow the boxed conformity of contemporary life that I seek to make visible..
LAURA CAREW
lauracarewstudio@gmail.com
Lives and works in London and on Exmoor
FINE ART EDUCATION
Chelsea College of Arts, Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, MA Public Art
London College of Communication. Photography (ABC),Digital lens based image making, digital design
Ruskin School of Art BA Fine Art
TEACHING
Chelsea College of Arts MA Fine Art AL
University of Hertfordshire. BA Fine Art AL
UAL PG Cert: Teaching in HE: Art
COLLABORATIONS WITH ARTISTS
Ian Hamilton-Finlay
Abigail Lane
Damien Hirst
Remo Bianco
Joseph Beuys
EXHIBITIONS AND PRIZES
RA Summer Exhibition,
National Portrait Gallery Taylor Wessing prize
Hungarian National Art academy
Soros Foundation ,Budapest
Timisoara Union of Artists
Demarco Gallery
Factual Nonsense
Bussey Building
Critics Choice (Clare Francis)
COMMISSIONS
Mount Stewart (painted panels),
Conran Design (Glass panels)
David Lean (Wall Paintings)
Basil Al Bayati Architects
Roberto Scio (Fresco Secco)
Chenil Galleries (Encaustic painting in domed ceiling)
